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This chapter describes an “immigrant Franz Rosenzweig,” who enters into conversation with two thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell, who embrace America as promising a new form of democratic life that, in every generation, calls upon a people to reimagine and rededicate themselves to the covenant of “We the people.” Besides reading America through a biblical lens of a sociality based upon (re)covenanting, Arendt and Cavell share many of Rosenzweig's concerns: in particular, taking philosophy out of its academic...

This chapter describes an “immigrant Franz Rosenzweig,” who enters into conversation with two thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell, who embrace America as promising a new form of democratic life that, in every generation, calls upon a people to reimagine and rededicate themselves to the covenant of “We the people.” Besides reading America through a biblical lens of a sociality based upon (re)covenanting, Arendt and Cavell share many of Rosenzweig's concerns: in particular, taking philosophy out of its academic professionalization and reconnecting philosophy with the “extraordinariness of ordinary life.” The chapter argues, that this immigrant Rosenzweig might learn to shed his Hegelian view of the state as a superindividual that legitimates itself through violence. The chapter shows that Arendt's notion of natality, is advanced precisely to counter this Hegelian view of the political as grounded in violence, a view that was most forcefully articulated in the work of Carl Schmitt.